The two authors share a combination of humor and sad longing. Their nonsequitur dialogues develop from the "slice of life" conversations of the 19th century:
see, for example, Henry James's turn-of-the-century The Awkward Age. Stein's and
Barthelme's apparently random but actually carefully controlled dialogues take
narrative in the direction of poetry. Though nothing "happens" during the dialogues, the compositions are not static. Recurrent lines give witness to the restless
movement of memory and anticipation and create new meanings in their constantly
shifting contexts.
Stein once implied that a writer writes in order to "measure every daughter
and to lessen every sister and to manage every mother and to sever every brother
and to undertake a father." (GP; p. 135). Barthelme could have garnered his subject
matter for The Dead Father from just such a list: the long burying of a father who
won't stay down. And when he seems to follow Stein's style in the Julie-Emma
conversations, the older author might well proclaim grandly, as she does in the first
lines of "Ladies' Voices (Curtain Raiser)": "Ladies' voices give pleasure" (GP; p.
203).
Ironic Intertexts: Echoes of René in Gide's Isabelle
DORIS Y. RADISH, Kent State University
This paper considers Gide's 1911 récit Isabelle with an eye to catching the echoes
of Chateaubriand's René that it contains, and to interpreting the significance of
those echoes for Gide generally as a narrative writer. The evidence for identifying
René as an intertextual model for Isabelle involves such elements as the use of a
first-person narrator, a frame narration, and letters. In examining these elements,
it will be our objective to show that Gide's intertextual relationship with Chateaubriand's novel is both ironic and self-conscious, as his literature generally and his
récits specifically tend to be. In the conclusion, we shall elaborate upon the ramifications of Gide's ironic intertextuality for an understanding of Isabelle's place in
Gide's development as a novelist.
We can begin our consideration of the textual evidence linking René and Isabelle
by detailing the similar use in the two novels of a frame. Chateaubriand's novel
begins, one will perhaps recall, with the voice of an unidentified frame narrator
who, for the first page or two of the novel, presents three characters who will play
a role in Rene's first-person account of his life: they are René himself and the two
characters he addresses in the text, his two narratees, Chartas and le père Souel.
It is indeed at the urging of these two narratees that René, who claims his story is
too personal to be of interest to others, finally agrees to give his first-person account;
we are told that "René avoit toujours donné pour motif de ses refus, le peu d'intérêt
de son histoire qui se bornoit, disoit-il, à celle de ses pensées et de ses sentiments." 1
Gide's Isabelle displays the use of a narrative frame which is strikingly similar
to the one we have just noted in René. T h e novel begins with the voice of an
1
Chateaubriand, René, ed. J. M. Gautier (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1970), p. 30. Subsequent references are
to this edition.
René and Isabelle
37
unidentified frame narrator, although his voice is in the first person rather than
the third person of Chateaubriand's text. Three narrative participants are introduced by him: Gérard who will provide the first-person account which constitutes
the main story in the novel plus two narratees, the poet Francis Jammes, and the
frame narrator himself at some time in the past. (Although this narrator is an
unidentified literary figure, readers are likely to assume him to be Gide himself.)
Gérard, like René, must be encouraged to relate the mysterious story which his
friends are eager to uncover and which he also claims is too personal to be of
interest to them: "Vous permettez alors que je parle beaucoup de moi, dit Gérard.—
Chacun de nous fait-il jamais rien d'autre! repartit Jammes." 2
There is another very striking narrative similarity between René and Isabelle
which lies in the use of letters as a distinctive narrative element. Those letters serve,
notably, to hint at the deep, dark secret which is central to the plot in both novels.
The deep, dark secret—referred to, interestingly enough, in both cases as "l'affreuse
vérité" (René, p. 66; Isabelle, p. 670)—is Amélie's incestuous passion in René and
Isabelle's murderous plot in Gide's novel. In both novels, the secret is first and
partially revealed through the letters in which the female protagonists themselves
disclose or allude to, in the first person, the nature of their secrets. T h e ultimate
revelation in both works also occurs in a similar manner, to wit, orally, by the female
protagonist.
Now, there are at least two noteworthy features of the narrative similarities
between René and Isabelle detailed above which suggest that Gide's attitude towards
his intertextual model was an ironic one. One concerns the frame and the other
concerns the female protagonist's revelation of "l'affreuse vérité," initially in a
written and then an oral form. In René, the frame narration occurs in the month
of May, at dawn, with the three narrative participants seated on the grass at the
foot of a tree. Through the use of such positive elements as springtime, morning,
and nature, Chateaubriand makes a positive statement about Rene's youth and the
hope and faith it inspires in Christians like Rene's narratees Chartas and le père
Souel.
In Isabelle, in contrast, the frame narration occurs in the month of August, in
the evening, in an interior setting. A sense of dejection, decline, and weariness
marks a narrative act set thus at the end of summer and the close of day. By setting
a negative tone in the frame narration, Gide makes a negative statement about
Gerard's youth which elicits an ironical response from disillusioned, intellectual
narratees like Jammes and the frame narrator. What they see in Gérard, specifically,
is a nefarious kind of romantic illusion fostered precisely by texts such as René.
Elsewhere, I might add, Gide makes clear his critical attitude toward Gerard's
romantic illusions: Isabelle, he says, is "la critique d'une certaine forme de l'imagination romantique." 3
What Gide is doing here, I suggest, is systematically emphasizing the differences
between the frame narration in his novel and in a work such as René. In conscious
protest against Romantic works like René, he is alluding to them and signaling them
as his target. Such allusions and signals can be referred to, as critic Goran Hermeran
suggests, as "antithetical similarities"; "there are similarities between the two authors—they deal with the same topic, they discuss it from the same aspects, they
can be compared to each other on a number of specific points"; yet at the same
2
André Gide, Romans (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1969), pp. 602-03. Subsequent references are to this edition.
5
André Gide, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Louis Martin-Chaufaer (Paris: Gallimard, 1932-39), XIII, 439-40.
38
The International Fiction Review, 12, No. 1 (1985)
time, "what one author says on these points is the antithesis of what the other says."4
It is through his use of such antithetical similarities that Gide alludes to René as an
intertextual model and fosters irony.
An ironic note can also be discerned in Gide's novel if we compare the revelations which the female protagonists make in René and Isabelle. Amélie writes to
René, obliquely alluding to her secret passion, in elegiacal, romantic sentences such
as die following: ". . . j e songerai à ces promenades que j e faisais avec vous au
milieu des bois, alors que nous croyions retrouver le bruit des mers dans la cime
agitée des pins" (p. 57). Isabelle, in contrast, writes a letter to her lover Blaise de
Gonfreville, whom she will have murdered by her servant, in which she expresses
concern about such uninspiring topics as robbing her mother's jewelry or getting
her feet wet when she and her lover elope. In both style and content, Isabelle's
letter displays the kind of antithetical similarities to Amélie's which promote irony.
It is also worth noting in this regard the contrasting ways in which the final
revelations are made. Rene's saintly sister Amélie, at the moment of taking her
vows, lets the awful truth escape from her lips; and the somber setting of a church
helps to sanctify and excuse her sin. T h e object of Gerard's romantic illusions, the
manipulative and mendacious Isabelle, makes her revelation in the same setting in
which René told his story to Chartas and le père Souel, that is, in a natural setting,
seated at what would have been the foot of a tree, had Isabelle not had the tree
chopped down; she has thereby demonstrated her disregard for that nature so
venerated by Chateaubriand and his Romantic generation. Thus whereas the narrative setting in René encourages the reader to excuse Amélie for her "sin," the
antithetically similar setting in Isabelle encourages the reader to condemn Isabelle
for hers.
We can conclude this consideration of Gide's ironic intertextual use of René in
Isabelle by observing, following critic Anne L. Martin, that Isabelle has wrongly been
associated by critics more with Gide's récits than with his novels, that is, more with
a morally than with an aesthetically focused kind of fiction. As Martin reminds us,
Gérard is, inter alia, an aspiring novelist; and she notes that "Gide . . . by centring
his story on a would-be novelist and not on a morally reprehensible heroine, shifted
its centre of gravity from an ethical to an aesthetic axis . . . Despite its masquerade
as a récit, Isabelle is in the lineage not of La Porte étroite, but of Paludes and of Les
Caves and Les Faux-Monnayeurs, for which it clears the way."5 Intertextuality in
Isabelle—that work's self-conscious, ironic reference to its literary predecessors and
conventions—lends significant additional support to Martin's interpretation of the
novel. And by extension, it lends additional support to the case wnich I, for one,
would want to make about Gide, namely that there is a truly literary nature to all
of his narrative texts—texts which in the past were perhaps scrutinized too often
for their superficial philosophical and personal models and too rarely for their
profound intertextual, properly novelistic ones.
"Watership Down: Tale and Myth"
FRANCISCO COLLADO RODRIGUEZ, University of
Saragosse
By the end of 1972, Rex Collings, a small British publisher, took, the risk of
publishing Richard Adams's first literary attempt, a novel about talking rabbits
called Watership Down. Despite the fact that the book had been rejected by several
agents and publishers before Collings, Watership Down became an enormous success,
4
Goran Hermeran, Influence in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 45-46.
5
Anne L. Martin, "Isabelle, or André Gide at the Crossroads," Essays in French Literature, 14 (1977), 4445.
Watership Down
39